DIVINE MEMORY

Artist-filmmaker Chinmoy Barma, photographer Anirban Hazarika, and writer Nilpawan Borah turn Assam’s Majuli into a canvas of grief, devotion, and creative memory for the late Zubeen Garg

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WHEN FILMMAKER CHINMOY BARMA stepped off the ferry in Majuli, this Raas Mahotsav, the island introduced itself the way only ancient landscapes can through the air.

"The first thing I noticed was the air," he said. “Cool, clean, carrying a soft sense of divinity, taking tiny steps into winter.” Only after that came the chorus: people moving toward the sattras, khol rehearsals thumping like a heartbeat under soil, and those unmistakable pre-Raas murmurs that sound like faith clearing its throat.

But this year, Majuli wasn’t just preparing for Raas. It was bracing around a very fresh bruise.

Assam hasn't recovered from losing the singer and composer Zubeen Garg, and Majuli - always hyper-attuned to the emotional weather of the region carried that grief. The island felt familiar, yes, but quieter. “The celebrations continued,” photographer Anirban Hazarika observed, “but with a quiet dignity, as though the island was honouring Assam’s cultural soul.” Tribute corners stood beside Raas stages like unplanned shrines. Cutouts of Zubeen da, draped in flowers, shared space with mythic tableaux. Groups walking to the pandals would inevitably slip into Mayabini.

Into this fragile terrain walked Chinmoy, Anirban, and writer Nilpawan Borah. They'd planned to document Raas. They ended up documenting the blurring of mythology and memory in a state that suddenly found its modern Krishna missing a journey that would eventually become their photo series, The Voice That Became The River.